What Got It Gets You
by LaH Carabele
Summary: No question Napoleon's got it, and that can sometimes aid in the oddest situations. TIMELINE: Summer 1971


**Author's Note:** Written for **Mood-Y: Challenge 3** on **LiveJournal's Section VII** MFU community.  
The key mood is: **bewildered**

* * *

_Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.  
__**~~~ Marilyn Monroe**_

**What Got It Gets You  
**by LaH

_**Summer 1971**_

He awoke with a start. He didn't know why all his instincts were on high alert; he just knew they were. He was dazed; yet aches and pains were slowly communicating themselves into his muddled brain from seemingly every portion of his body.

Where was he? How had he gotten here? And why the hell did he feel like he had been dragged ten miles by a Mack truck?

He tried to focus. Tried to piece things together. Even the most basic facts about himself were escaping his recall. His mind couldn't pinpoint his own name. Every bit of mental data seemed for the moment beyond his range of cognitive concentration.

Attempting to sit up, he realized he was in some way bound to the chaise on which he lay. Though it was quite a comfortable divan, to be sure, complete with an upholstered throw pillow strategically placed under his head. Those two facts just didn't fit together into a whole that made any cohesive sense. What the hell was going on?

"So you're finally awake," a female voice virtually purred from somewhere on the periphery of his visual field. "Bit more punch to the new knock-out concoction than I anticipated. Really, Napoleon, I do so hate when I am put in a position to have to personally check your stubborn U.N.C.L.E. interference."

Napoleon? Was that him? And who was this woman? Seemingly an enemy by her statement. She spoke with a vocal accent: European, though he couldn't quite put a finger on its exact origin.

She came at last into his sightline as she made her way toward him. She then perched on the edge of the settee, a high slit in her tight skirt revealing a very lethal-looking semi-automatic pistol stored in a cherry-colored leather holster strapped to one perfectly curved thigh. Leaning forward, she reached out and stroked his hair with intimate familiarity.

She was blonde: very blonde, almost too blonde. Pretty, but not in any fresh-faced way. More in the way of a woman who purposely emphasized her best assets to center male attention. Her crimson-glossed mouth was the slightest bit crooked, but that just provided the right counterbalance to her otherwise practiced brand of attractiveness.

"Are you going to play the righteous defender of all things good and noble and not talk to me?" she queried with a definite pout.

"_Play it smooth,"_ he wisely advised himself in thought. _"Play it confident. If she understands that you don't know who she is, and – more importantly – have no idea who you are yourself or why you are here, something might happen that wouldn't be particularly pleasant. After all, you are her prisoner."_

"What do you want me to say?" he thus responded glibly, being sure to use a verbal tone that suggested he was disappointed in but unsurprised by her actions… whatever those actions had been.

"I had you brought here very much alive, if a good deal less than conscious, when I could have had you killed outright," she forwarded in a somewhat petulant voice.

"_Flirting," _Napoleon's natural instincts supplied the startling reality. _"The words may be challenging; nevertheless she's flirting with you. So flirt right back."_

"You could have," he agreed easily, skillfully concealing the fact the very last thing he felt up to doing, with his throbbing head and sore body, was join his captor in a virtual hand of innuendo-laden verbal poker. "But you wouldn't have," he nonetheless teased with a suggestive smile, chancing on what he heard beyond her actual words, what he sensed intuitively in her manner with him.

"Don't be so sure of me, Napoleon Solo," the blonde bombshell expressed her own displeasure at his seemingly smug self-certain attitude. "We play our games of cat-and-mouse and I freely acknowledge enjoying each and every aspect of them. Do not, however, ever make the mistake of backing me into a corner."

"Because you have very sharp claws," he surmised, forcing his lips into a purposely provocative smirk.

"As you well know, darling," she finalized as she leaned down toward him again. This time, instead of stroking his hair, she used one of her long, scarlet painted nails to scratch down the side his face, drawing in its wake a thin line of blood of a red hue well-matched to her glossy lipstick, lacquered nails and sexy thigh holster.

"You live another day, my handsome foil," she conceded. "But do not engage in this dicey albeit diverting pastime too often with me," she issued a final warning. After depositing a far from chaste kiss on his mouth, she was gone, exiting through some portal beyond his ability to view from his restrained position.

He exhaled in momentary relief. He was still confined by the ropes that held him down, but at least he could rest his weary body and more vitally his weary mind. He had to conceive a strategy for escape, he knew. Such would require enough cerebral effort that he was grateful there was no present need to split his attention with devising any more suave silver-tongued counters to her coquettish sallies. He closed his eyes briefly and then shot them wide-open as a popping and sizzling sound greeted his ears. In wake of that sound another blond, this one male, entered the room.

"You all right, Napoleon?" Illya asked his partner as he set about freeing the other man from the bindings securing him to the chaise. "I figured she had secreted you someplace after having her Thrush goons work you over. I succeeded, rather handily I will admit, in picking up her trail and tracking it to this location."

Some pieces were at last falling into place in his bewildered mind. "Illya?" he questioned the blond man.

"You were expecting maybe the Lone Ranger?" Illya jested. Then he took notice of Napoleon's extremely dilated pupils. "She drugged you?"

"I think so, but I honestly don't remember," confessed Napoleon.

"You will be fine," Illya reassured the other man as he took a quick assessment of Napoleon's condition with a trained enforcement agent's eye. "We'll get you to Medical. The staff there will get rid of whatever chemical is in your system, as well as take care of any other more physical damage."

"Medical at U.N.C.L.E., right?" Napoleon probed as more pieces fell into place within his drug-and-injury addled brain.

Illya smirked. "That's right."

Instinctively Napoleon trusted this other man, though his memory was still far from perfect. So he nodded his acceptance of the stated plan.

As Illya aided him in sitting up, Napoleon couldn't help asking, "But that woman… She seemed…" He hesitated, unsure of how to describe it. "She's an enemy, right? Yet she seemed…" He still found no way to define what he had sensed coming from the woman regarding him. So he simply summarized, "She was flirting with me even as she threatened me. So I flirted right back. That seemed to keep her off-balance enough to not shoot me. She knows me well?" he finally inquired.

Illya froze for a second and then burst out laughing uncontrollably. He found it incredibly droll that a pharmaceutical cocktail administered to the captured U.N.C.L.E. agent by the lady herself had – at least temporarily – robbed Napoleon of his rational recognition of Angelique. Solo had, therefore, merely employed on her the same tactics he instinctively employed on any woman. No special treatment, just vintage Napoleon Solo: a likely unforeseen side-effect that surely would bring on one of the femme fatale's famed sulky moues …if she ever came to hear of it.

"What's so funny?"

"Napoleon," declared Illya when his amusement was at last spent, "let us just say whatever it is you've got that women respond to so… viscerally managed to get you away from the fatal bite of a certain deadly spider lady... again."

—**The End—**


End file.
